Museum Explores Trials and Triumphs of Female Artists

At first glance, “You Go, Girl! Celebrating Women Artists,” the exuberantly titled exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art, looks like many other surveys of American art, especially on Long Island, filled with lots of landscapes and abstracts. But step a little closer — close enough to notice details and read the texts on the walls — and you’ll learn about the difficulties that female artists have faced and how they’ve adapted or triumphed over them.

Take, for example, “Berthe Morisot & Me,” a collage from the 1970s by Miriam Schapiro. The title refers to a well-known artist of the 19th century who focused on domestic scenes, in part because she couldn’t enter bars or other venues where male artists often found their subjects. Ms. Schapiro framed samples of Ms. Morisot’s work with decorative patterns that evoke quilting and other crafts historically associated with women.

“Miriam Schapiro has been so crucial to the advancement of women in the arts, and she’s connecting to historical women in her art,” said Lisa Chalif, the exhibition curator.

In 1971, Ms. Schapiro, who died last year, co-founded, with Judy Chicago, the first feminist art program in the United States, at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. (An earlier version of the program had been introduced at Fresno State College the year before.) The 1970s saw the founding of many female-centric artist organizations and the staging of protests by women who felt they were not getting the same opportunities as male artists to show their work, Ms. Chalif said.

Because the exhibition is drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and doesn’t cover all eras, it “is not the story of women in art,” Ms. Chalif said. However, there are common threads in the artists’ lives. Women were often barred from art schools and from drawing nude models in the 19th century, and up through the 20th century, several opted to change their career paths after they married or had children.

Ellen Thayer Fisher, born in 1847, learned drawing and painting techniques from her brother, the artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. “Like most female artists of her generation, Fisher did not have access to nude models and therefore depicted subjects that were more readily available, in her case flora and fauna,” explained wall text from the show. She painted “Lady Slipper,” a watercolor of an orchid, in 1878.

Although educational opportunities improved in the 20th century, Alice Morgan Wright, born in 1881, was not allowed to sketch nude men in her classes at the Art Students League. Undeterred, she attended boxing and wrestling matches. She also became a women’s suffragist. Her monotype “Nude” (before 1930), shows a very muscular man.

Among the women who changed course after marriage was Elsie Driggs, who in 1935 gave up painting — for which she had been acclaimed — to manage the career of her husband, the artist Lee Gatch, and raise their family. However, she continued to use watercolors, working at her kitchen table. After her husband died in 1968, she returned to painting and mixed media. In “Riot,” her circa 1929 watercolor and pencil on paper, she “captures the unruly aggression of a mob,” according to more wall text from the show.

Like Ms. Driggs, Mary Nimmo Moran devoted herself after marriage to managing the career of her artist-husband, Thomas Moran, and raising their children. But Mr. Moran encouraged her to try etching, at which she excelled. Her etching “Solitude” (1880) was based on her observation of nature.

Her husband is better known, as is the case with a few other artists in the exhibition, including Elaine de Kooning, wife of Willem de Kooning, and Helen Torr, wife of Arthur Dove. (All three couples lived on Long Island.)

Things didn’t always end well if the wife stood out. After Rhoda Holmes Nicholls’s work was accepted to the Paris Salon in 1897 while that of her husband, Burr Nicholls, was rejected, the couple separated and later divorced. “Newspapers across the country spun the story into a cautionary tale of the threat a woman’s success posed to domestic and marital bliss,” the museum’s wall text explains. Her watercolor “Thistle Down and Dark Trees, Shinnecock,” c. 1890s, was made on the East End.

“Big Daddy Paper Doll,” a 1971 serigraph by May Stevens that shows a white male figure and several outfits he could wear, including those of a butcher and an executioner, is the most blatantly political work in the exhibition, Ms. Chalif said.

Other artists, like Howardena Doreen Pindell, a professor at Stony Brook University, who has often addressed feminism, racism and other issues in her art, have works in the show that are not political. Ms. Pindell’s 1996 mixed-media “Relationships (Kandinsky #1), is mostly abstract with the words “love” and “joy” in several languages scattered about. Audrey Flack’s 1972 “Lady Madonna,” a lithograph with gold leaf, depicts a weeping figure made in the 17th century by the Spanish sculptor Luisa Roldán.

Janet Culbertson’s 1979 “Scene VIII,” a textured landscape, is part of her series about the Grand Canyon, the artist said in a phone conversation, and is also part of her work as a self-described “eco-feminist.” Starting in the 1970s, she said, “Some of us linked our viewpoint with saving the earth.”

Ms. Culbertson, who lives in Shelter Island Heights, was in a show of four female artists at the Heckscher in 1980 organized by Katherine Lochridge, then the director. “It was so terrific to have that,” she said. “This is a renewal of that type of positive thinking.”